End of November 2010

Cyclo-crossing

There is no off-season in cycling, not since track racing became a winter sport and cyclo-cross exploded in popularity. There’s a bit of talk going around in the UK about dumbing
down cyclo-cross; easier courses,
new technical rules. Well I was in Belgium recently, the epicentre of world cyclo-cross, and there’s no dumbing down there.

Belgian cross courses are either sandy or muddy, and whichever one they are means extreme sand or extreme mud. Zonhoven is sandy, and has descents so steep that they are as terrifying as bungee jumps; only without the bungee. The only way down on wheels is to hit a rut some earlier bike-handing
acrobat has carved out, and even then
the slightest wobble means a head-
over-heals crash. Only the best can ride;
the rest run down the Zonhoven sandbanks, and even then some of them manage to crash

Running downhill was a feature of the Koppenbergcross. Based on the infamous cobbled climb that is so crucial in the Tour of Flanders, the race course uses 300 metres of the climb and the fields either side of it. This year the muddy fields slowed the race to a slog fest, with everyone riding a bit and running a bit to get around the course.

Britain’s Helen Wyman was the winner of the women’s Koppenbergcross, and a few days later I photographed her training in the park near her home in Oudenaarde with former world’s ‘cross silver medallist, the American, Jonathan Page.

Helen has lived in Belgium for a while
now, and has become the best female
cyclo-cross racer our country has ever
produced, apart from one fact. She
hasn’t the world championship medal that Louise Robinson won.

What she has done, though, is place, and now win, some of cyclo-cross’s classic races. They are races that don’t get so much publicity here, but they are huge in Belgium, nearly as big as the road classics. For example, 27,000 people paid to watch the Koppenbergcross, and nearly 700,000 watched on TV. To excel in the competition created by that level of interest means that a world medal is inevitable.

There's a story about Helen and Jonathan's training session in the November 25th issue of Cycling Weekly.